It's been a hard fall from grace for troubled personal computer giant Hewlett-Packard Comp. (HPQ). After the board booted successful CEO Mark Hurd for an illicit office affair with a marketing contractor-cum-ex-adult film star, it made the disastrous decision to hire Léo Apotheker, an executive with a troubled past and little experience in the America market.

Mr. Apotheker came to HP shortly after being essentially fired from German enterprise software giant SAP AG (ETR:SAP). He was fired after only a year as CEO on allegations that he turned a blind eye to software theft, was belligerent to trade unions, and generally mismanaged the company's finances.

In its earnings guidance HP announced that it expects to take a massive $8.8B USD write-down due to "accounting improprieties". The guidance reads:

The charge relates to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy that occurred prior to HP's acquisition of Autonomy and the trading value of HP stock during the period preceding the recording of the charge. In the third quarter of fiscal 2012, HP recorded an impairment charge for the goodwill associated with its Services segment following an impairment review driven by, among other things, the trading value of HP stock during the period preceding the recording of the charge, market conditions and business trends within that segment.

Analysts had been expecting around $0.87 USD/share earnings. With the massive write-down, EPS are expected to dip to between $0.68 and $0.71 USD/share.

This Autonomy poster seems rather ironic in retrospect, considering the software company is alleged to have duped HP out of billions via bad accounting. [Image Source: Autonomy]

As the company approaches its fiscal Q1 2013, the holidays bring little joy to HP. The company looks set to lose its top spot to the Hong Kong-based Lenovo Group, Ltd. (HKG:0992). Gartner Inc.'s (IT) numbers indicated that Lenovo already passed HP last quarter, although the other major reporting agency, the IDC Group claimed HP clung to a narrow lead. Given the trends, though, it is expected Lenovo will be well ahead of HP in unit sales for calendar Q4 2012 (fiscal Q1 2013 for HP).

HP shares have plunged 10 percent in pre-market trading. Analysts were already pessimistic, as the previous earnings guidance was consider weak. If that one was consider weak, though, this one can only be regarded as an utter disaster for the Palo Alto-based hardware veteran.

How is that relevant? Apple got a lot of value out of NeXT. HP has been getting almost zero value out of its largest acquisitions for more than a decade now. What is Apple stock price? And what is HPQ stock price? Ok, there you go.